Monday, 30 December 2013

Talos

Talos with some of my Foundry Argonauts

I am very grateful to my particular friend Sophie, from Vancouver, for giving me something I have been after for ages: the twelve inch vinyl Talos model by X-plus. This is a recreation of the creature from the Ray Harryhausen film Jason and the Argonauts.

Ray Harryhausen with his original model of Talos

Now the scale isn't right, of course, but it is quite acceptable for wargaming purposes. In one way it is actually life size because the original model made by Ray Harryhausen is about one foot tall!

In fact the scale of Talos changes from scene to scene in the film. Taking the Colossus of Rhodes as their guide (the mythological Talos was only eight feet tall -a 40mm figure would work better for purists) the filmmakers said that Talos was about 100 feet tall. Indeed if you look at the height of Todd Armstrong compared with the life sized prop foot they built for the film and extrapolate his height upwards then Talos is about 120 feet tall; over two feet tall to be in scale for a 28mm figure.

Harryhausen's original model

However, when Talos first appears he towers over the cliffs on the location at Palinuro in Italy.

In the famous sequence where he bestrides the channel like a colossus (a deliberate nod to the Colossus of Rhodes), to paraphrase Shakespeare, and picks up the Argo he must be more like 500 feet tall.

So I'm not worried about the size of the model. He is appropriately big for 28mm figures, working out at about sixty feet tall, scale size.

Going for about the same cost on the internet is the now defunct Maelstrom Game's resin Talos which came in at about six inches. So if you want to do 15mm Argonauts (but why would you?) it could be just the job, despite not being modelled on the Harryhausen version.

Talos (or Talus) has, like many Greek mythological figures, a somewhat confused history. Like Cronos, Talos has pre-Greek origins so carries the story of being the last of his race. In one version of the story Talos was made by Hephaestus for King Minos of Crete. Here the story gets conflated with that of the minotaur as the automaton Talos made was in the form of a bull.

In the other main version of the story Talos was a gift from Zeus to Europa, mother of Minos of Crete. Rather than being an automaton he was a living creature, albeit made from bronze. He had a real vein running from ankle to neck containing ichor, the lifeblood of the gods, and one weak spot in his ankle (reminiscent of Achilles heel) where a bronze nail (or a great big hatch in the Harryhausen version) keeps his ichor inside his body.

The death of Talos on a Greek vase

Anyway, he was seen as the guardian of Crete so when the Argonauts tried to land there on their long journey back from having taken the golden fleece (not beforehand as in the Harryhausen film) Talos throws rocks at the Argo to keep them away. He was either killed by an arrow in the ankle shot by Poeus, one of the Argonauts, using Heracles bow, or tricked by Medea's sorcery to remove the nail in his ankle vein in exchange for promised immortality or hypnotised into dropping one of the rocks on his ankle. The talus bone in the ankle is named after him.

Anyway, despite all of this confusion he is still the guardian of Crete and someone the Argonauts will have to vanquish through archery or sorcery if they want to resupply the Argo.